


Visiting Rights

by GrayJay



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Professor Xavier is a jerk, mindfuckery, relationships, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-12 23:00:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1203712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott's mind is a Winchester House of false doors and dead ends, deadfalls and secret passages built on and over and through each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visiting Rights

**Author's Note:**

> Set nebulously before _X-Men: Legacy_ #215, for what little difference that makes: _"Someone else has visiting rights inside my head these days. Someone who'd spot a thought that didn't belong there and know it for what it was."_
> 
> Can be read as the second half a diptych, with ["Security Measures"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1465348), which is set a few years prior.

It’s not long after she first spends the night in Scott's room that it occurs to Emma that perhaps she is less _in love_ than _aggressively intrigued_. They are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, and Emma has little enough experience with either to care one way or the other. As long as she knows _what_ she wants, _why_ takes a distant backseat. 

She recalls Hank having once described Scott as “telepath catnip,” which characterization has some merit; she has grown to suspect that Jean’s formidable and subtle skills were as much a result of honing her powers on a teenage Scott Summers as of Xavier’s tutelage. His mind is a Winchester House of false doors and dead ends, deadfalls and secret passages built on and over and through each other. Scott himself avoids the labyrinth as much as he can: his psychic footsteps walk a few familiar corridors, leaving the dust upstairs largely undisturbed. Either he doesn’t care what’s lurking around the darker corners, or he knows and has elected to stay clear. 

Emma has no such compunction, and she avails herself freely of the bowl of keys in the foyer--unlabeled, and far fewer than the locked doors. After all: Scott has left them there, out in the open, and she is beginning to learn that he has few real secrets, just places he prefers not to go. 

Or perhaps, she realizes, he is used to home invasion, has learned that deadbolts are only an invitation to splintered door frames. She has begun to recognize the signatures of different craftsmen in the spiraling corridors and papered-over windows and sudden walls where no walls should be, and only a fraction of them are Scott’s. Emma brings in her own tools: a crowbar, a diamond-tipped blade, heavy gloves. 

* * *

Renovation is not Emma’s style, but she begins, carefully, to excavate, mapping abandoned passageways and salvaging occasional relics. Some Emma notes discreetly, for her own reference: points of stress, traps yet untriggered, a clock counting down to something still far in the future. Gradually, she is building a secret map of shortcuts and back doors: whether or not she is in love, Emma is first and foremost practical. Others, she brings back for identification, leaving her finds like offerings in the chambers of Scott’s mind he most often frequents. When she returns, they’ve been carefully shelved, maps filed, neatly annotated with post-its and red pen. 

>>A singed teddy bear she rescues from a room with no floor, where everything smells like fire and she is very small and very afraid and clinging to someone smaller still, so hard her hands are cramped into claws when she emerges: _Alex’s. Lost when we fell._

>>A diamond key that opens a door she at first assumes must belong to her but which leads instead to a dark, dirty room and a loud angry voice and diamond shards everywhere she steps: _Jack, before. Jack, after._

>>A place that is somehow a dormitory and a classroom and a laboratory all at once, beds emerging from desks, a lamp that spins like a centrifuge, heads with too many faces, multiplication tables of needles: _Orphanage. ~~Milbury~~ Sinister. A lot of it's still missing._ An afterthought: _Sorry for the mess._

>>A room with a ruby-red door and beyond it nothing but the bluest sky she has ever seen. _~~Jean~~ ~~Phoenix~~ Jean_

One note, orphaned, on the end of a shelf: _Thank you._ Unwritten: _For not asking me to go with you._

She starts to see how long and hard he must have worked for even a small measure of control, imagines the years it must have taken for him to claim and sort the contents of those few precious rooms. Even there, very little is wholly intact: furniture stained and water damaged, family photographs that smolder dully without ever quite burning away--all painstakingly salvaged from the wreckage surrounding the small, calm nexus. Even in the dustiest and most tangled corridors and catacombs, she has seen telltale blast damage. Emma flips through an album and wonders how many hells Scott has plunged into to recapture the fragments of memory within. 

Most minds Emma has explored are full of interwoven patterns, intuitive progressions and mnemonic associations. Scott’s is a hall of broken mirrors, shards sharp and mismatched, with no real order beyond the spaces he himself occupies. The same doors don’t always open to the same rooms, and the memories beyond lack the depersonalization of time; everything is immediate and immersive, and Emma learns to watch her step after an Alice-In-Hell tumble from a physics lecture to an operating table. Some memories are surrounded with tiny licks of flame and a presence so strong that Emma shoots out of Scott’s mind in brief, confused panic before remembering that Jean Grey is really and truly dead. She returns to watch those memories with curiosity so acute it borders on spite: first kisses and awkward, clandestine fumbles; danger room sessions; the quiet moments between missions; far futures and distant pasts. The flames don’t burn her, but they don’t burn out, either. 

* * *

Jean’s touch weaves through Scott organically and seamlessly. Emma is reminded, jealously, of saplings whose branches become intertwined over years of growth; she has been prone to forgetting how long Scott and Jean knew each other before, how much of each was shaped by proximity to the other. She briefly considers doing him the favor of cutting away what is now so much dead wood, but demurs, unsure how much of Scott would be left after. Emma can’t always tell which shared memories are Scott’s and which are echoes of Jean’s, and she’s surprised at how reassuring she finds that. She could never compete with Jean on this field, but then, she wouldn’t really want to. 

Sinister’s revisions are ruthless and whimsical: whole wings cauterized, hallways crudely rerouted into Escheresque fantasies then abandoned mid-construction in a mess of scaffolding and scalpels, leaving collateral damage of dead ends and floating, unreachable rooms. Emma gets badly lost in one spiraling series of corridors where the air is red and everything _hurts_ with a pulsating insistence that makes navigation impossible. For what seems like hours, she opens doors at random, until one leads to a room that she is certain was on another floor, and she steps through with a sudden, wrenching feeling of being two places at once and nowhere at all. 

And then, there’s Charles. 

Emma may be a monster, but she knows what she is, and it is a point of pride that she has never pretended otherwise. Charles, though--Charles has operated with a pretense of compassion that makes the reality of his modifications that much more grotesque. Where Sinister uprooted rooms and reshaped halls, Charles did his best to be gentle when he laid the foundation for a lifetime of convenient lies and subtle compulsions. Doors are mislabeled, plastered smoothly over, fitted with locks that don’t match any of Scott’s own keys. Emma dismantles some on her own, brings other to Scott’s attention, to deal with as he chooses. A few, she leaves untouched but notes on her private map. She finds the wreckage of Gabriel’s grave in the blasted rubble of what looks like a pantomime set assembled piecemeal from the remains of other ransacked memories; and throughout, embroidered on samplers and worked into the patterns of baroque wallpaper, _For your own good_. 

* * *

Does Scott know the extent to which his mind isn’t his own? He must--his control over the few spaces he regularly occupies is the tightest she’s encountered outside of other telepaths. Elsewhere, she’s found boarded-up doors smashed through, scarred with the signature patterns of his optic blasts. In a few places, there are notes carved deeply and deliberately into the walls: _This is Sinister. This is Charles. This is you. This is not you. This is a lie but the important parts are true._ In a childish hand, scratched into the underside of a dormitory bed in the orphanage that is also a lab: _Alex is real._ A few are in other people’s handwriting. She recognizes Jean’s in a few places ( _Not your fault. Me, too. Always._ ) and a heavy scrawl that she can’t place ( _Thank you. I wish. I know._ ) until Scott post-it notes her description: _Nathan Christopher._

Emma restrains herself from adding snide remarks until the day she finally gives in to idle curiosity and decides to seek out her own point of origin: a white silhouette, small and desperate in a sea of Phoenix fire. She’s not sure if the fear she feels is hers or Scott’s or both, but Emma _knows_ that this is nothing more than a memory, and she edges around the flames to write with one finger, in a glittering diamond slick, _As I recall, I won that round._ God knows _that_ happened seldom enough to be worth remarking on, she thinks, and then, _Well, we have that much in common_. 

That night, in bed, he’s absentmindedly painting her toenails. Neither of them can quite recall when or how it went from joke to habit, habit to ritual, but he's good enough at it that it's never really occurred to her to mind. 

“You recall right,” he says, out of nowhere, and it takes her a minute to realize what he’s referring to. It’s the first time he’s acknowledged her expeditions aloud; but then, it’s also the first time she’s indulged in grade-school vandalism. “Surprised the hell out of me. I really thought she was going to kill you.” 

Emma blinks. “Well, she didn’t.” 

“Any fight you can walk away from,” says Scott, and dips the brush back in the bottle. It occurs to Emma suddenly that he is trying to reassure her: not that she won, but that her memory is real and right. That this is the sort of thing Scott Summers worries about. 

“I can walk away from anything, darling,” Emma says, and wonders if she’s telling the truth.


End file.
